It’s starting to look like a do-over

Vote by mail. OK, that’s the way I already vote. I will do what they say and vote again, differently this time, since I inked John Edwards for the Jan. 29 primary. Or will Edwards be on the ballot again, with Gravel and Kucinich, the big guy from New Mexico, etc etc?

I hate to say it, but I’m detecting a common thread in our two soap operas here in Florida: the primary that “didn’t count,” and the two members of Congress who don’t back their fellow Democrats.

In both cases, Republican political tricksters have steering in their bumper cars, while our cars have none.

It probably was Karl Rove who told the Republicans in the Florida Legislature to advance the primary date so early that there’d be an explosion. And Rove’s boss’s brother Jeb probably drew the gerrymandered districts that make our two Democratic members of the U.S. House so sassy and our three Republicans in the U.S. House so … words fail me. They all lack the good American tonic of competition. All five of them.

If we want to keep our supreme chance of electing a Democratic president in November, we must not be made into fools any more. This new plan must be bulletproof. Some silly way of restaging a primary will make the country laugh at Florida and at our two presidential candidates and at Democrats all over the land. And even if it’s not silly, Rush and Sean and Foxy will make it seem so. They will be able to quote the Miami Herald’s future scathing editorials about our inability to take our medicine.

The ray of hope I see in our situation is that we do have three honestly strong and good candidates for Congress in Annette Taddeo (FL-18), Raul Martinez (FL-21) and Joe Garcia (FL-25). This is a powerful dash of competition to be added to the political mix in Florida. We must work for them flat-out.

Meanwhile, I had the good fortune Wednesday afternoon to be at Miami Beach City Hall when the City Commission passed a resolution that urged the Democratic presidential candidates and all involved to work for a solution to the Florida primary that didn’t count. The draft resolution suggested several methods for a new vote but was amended to leave out all ideas as to how it might be done. Wise choice; passed unanimously. I don’t think a coin flip was one of the abandoned ideas.